Hut site, An Coimín, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Coimín, Co. Kerry

On the Bull's Head promontory, a broad headland pushing south-westward into Dingle Bay, the ground along a central ridge holds the quiet remains of at least fourteen ancient hut-sites.

They are not dramatic ruins; they are low, worn shapes in the landscape, their walls reduced to stony banks or courses of drystone, and many of them borrow directly from the bedrock beneath, incorporating outcrops of living stone into their structure as though the builders saw no clear boundary between what the land offered and what they needed to make.

The huts vary considerably in form and scale. Some are roughly circular, others oval, others edging toward the sub-rectangular, and their internal diameters run from as little as two metres to as much as six. Several are conjoined, sharing walls or pressing up against one another, which suggests either phased construction over time or a community that built in clusters rather than isolation. The survey of the Dingle Peninsula carried out by J. Cuppage and published in 1986 under the title 'Corca Dhuibhne' documented the group, and it remains the primary record of what stands here. The date of the huts is not specified in that account, but drystone hut settlements of this kind on exposed Atlantic headlands are a recurring feature of early medieval and prehistoric Kerry, places where communities made use of naturally defensible or bounded ground.

The huts extend westward from a set of walls along both sides of the ridge and across its summit, which gives some sense of how to read the landscape if you are standing there: the ridge itself is the organizing spine, and the structures fan out from it. Because so much of the construction relies on the natural rock, the remains can be easy to overlook underfoot, blending into the general stony texture of the headland.

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